In An Outline of the Origins of Money, newly translated into English by Enrique Martino and Mario Schmidt, Heinrich Schurtz reminds us that hoards “only become fruitful when their owner generously distributes them to his friends and followers” (67). Libraries are also a classic type of hoard, albeit with many bibliographic treasures that fail to circulate. What a joy, then, to voice sincere gratitude to the translators and Hau Books for republishing this gem that can now re-emerge from its social death to offer us new bounty today. Martino and Schmidt have done a magnificent job rendering Schurtz's highly descriptive text into a lively and readable book, which also offers many footnotes to help us digest some arcane threads of economic history. Beyond this, their excellent introductory essay contextualizes Schurtz's work not only in the time that he was writing but all the way up to our current era. Their synopsis is so comprehensive that it could fruitfully be used in many introductory courses on economic anthropology. Michael Hudson's foreword is the icing on the cake, as it illuminates the manner in which the battles in which Schurtz was engaged have carried forward into the present, where our monetary theory and practice are dominated by “pro-creditor ideologues.” Previous systems of monetary organization, by contrast, frequently managed to better balance the interests of creditors and debtors. Moreover, the Outline has been lifted from its hoard at the perfect moment. As Hudson so effectively captures, we are in the grips of an economic orthodoxy that has—at least partly—led us to what is now called a global “polycrisis.” Schurtz's inductive approach to money is incontestably rigorous, reintroducing us to an almost bewildering menagerie of monetary forms that can help us call into question many of the deductive, syllogistic axioms that have dominated economic thinking for decades. Out of his immense catalog of monetary difference, Schurtz manages to identify some reliable instances of monetary sameness that can then be used to think critically about money today. While doing so, he is quick to remind us that there can be no strict and hermetically sealed “scientific” categories; instead, he treats money as an always-in-formation phenomenon, impossible to perfectly pin down but still harboring certain repetitive tendencies. In this way, the book stands as a model for convincing policymakers to listen to anthropological studies. Even though it was published more than a century ago, Schurtz himself is aware of these stakes, which still haunt us today. The Outline both opens and closes with a broadside against economic orthodoxy. Despite these seeming polemics, Schurtz is a surprisingly supple theorist, refusing to fall into one camp or the other of conventional divides within economic thinking. Instead, he believes that “the only correct method is … to examine each individual case without prejudice” (164). For example, he follows Menger's “double-coincidence of wants” approach with respect to the origin of money in certain instances. His critique, then, is directed more against the universalistic aspect of economists' findings—sadly, such a critique is as useful today as it was in the late 19th century. To bolster this antiuniversalist stance, Schurtz relies on what today would be called the material affordances of money. In this sense, his book provides an almost Latourian approach to money. Its inner spirit might have general tendencies, but its outer shell constantly pushes back, causing deviations and opening new pathways in the lived world. For example, because of the nature of their physical incarnation, some currencies also double as ornament, while others have daily utility beyond their exchange value. In each instance, we learn that the other roles that money is asked to perform have a significant impact not only on its supply and demand but also on the general management and functioning of any given monetary system. For example, fabric-money (chapter 12) has entirely different physical properties from iron-money (chapter 14), and these properties clearly impact their divergent capacities in the world of trade and wealth management. Refreshingly, in offering his Wunderkammer of monetary forms, Schurtz steadfastly refuses to describe an evolutionary trajectory. Despite the title, his book never posits a uniform origin for money. Money instead rides the waves and cycles of human history—more of an elastic spectrum than a clear-cut, secular arc. While there is much discussion of “primitive” money, this is more of a term of art for a highly typical form of money, and once a given currency has left its primitive stage, it can just as easily devolve back into it. So-called modern money would be the aspirational fusion of two primitive forms, but this highly tentative fusion lasts only as long as the power behind the currency endures (83, 166). Schurtz baptizes these two “primitive” forms of money: inside- and outside-money. Inside-money tallies trading within a given group, whereas outside-money allows for trade to occur across groups. Consequently, inside-money trends closer to what we might call “fiat” money today—money that has no market value outside its role as a tallying device. Outside-money, on the other hand, trends toward today's “commodity” money—a monetary sign that can be trusted across groups because of its market value. If we follow his argument, we can see that his idea remained operative at least through the gold standard era (and arguably beyond, but I do not want to engage in too much arcana here). At that time, countries tallied in a national currency on a daily cycle, while their central banks piled up gold that could be shipped across the world to settle the balance of payments at the end of annual cycles (see Peebles and Luzzatto 2025). We should note here that Schurtz's inside/outside distinction thereby reproduces a very long-standing trope within anthropology that distinguishes the commercial world from the domestic world, while it also largely harmonizes with the overarching debate between the orthodox and heterodox wings of economics. Zelizer's influential work (e.g., Zelizer 1997) has called for us to question the sharp divide between commercial and domestic money—a close reading of Schurtz reveals a similar attitude. Schurtz holds that while inside- and outside-money are ideal types that materialize in the lived world, they often share traits of their opposites in any given instance. In short, money is multiple: “What we now call ‘money’ is also an illusory unity” (34). Many of these general tendencies are worthy of further anthropological research or have even been studied by us for decades without deeply caring about the helpful inside/outside distinction. For example, an entire swath of economic anthropology texts starting with Bohannon's (1959) work on the Tiv emphasized how “money destroys community.” Rereading these texts through a Schurtzian lens would likely affirm Schurtz's overall scheme—it is not that money as such has destroyed the community but rather that outside-money has gradually overtaken inside-money. As Schurtz suggests, the status hierarchy tallied and enshrined by inside-money is often challenged by insiders who themselves take advantage of outside-money's different affordances to dismantle the hierarchies under which they suffer at home. The behavior of the Tiv youth, who challenged chiefly hegemony with “general purpose money,” is easily explained by Schurtz's notion of the “corrective effect of outside-money” (45). For policymakers today, Schurtz's inside/outside distinction also helpfully allows us to drill down on the question of liquidity and how it is secured and nurtured. Central banks have frequently hoarded outside-money to guarantee the liquidity of inside-money. Because much inside-money worldwide is simply unrecognized by outside parties, it requires a hoard of outside-money to back it. Via this pathway, Schurtz opens the door to understanding imperial money as the ideal type of modern money—that volatile fusion when one powerful society's inside-money becomes outside-money and then gradually becomes other groups' inside-money. You can witness this today by tracing the history of the US dollar and its current questioning by countries such as China, which are now asking merchants to tally some purchases in renminbi. Here we witness, in real time, just the sort of elastic spectrum of monetary practice and policy that Schurtz insisted upon. Another important policy consideration opened up by Schurtz's inside/outside distinction pertains to the monetary management of inflation expectations. We ordinarily associate inflation with time-based reckoning (i.e., money loses value as it becomes more distant from its date of birth), but Schurtz offers numerous examples of what we might term “place-based” inflation, wherein money can either gain or lose value as it traverses ever-larger distances from its place of birth. We should not be surprised by this, since thinkers as diverse as Edgar Allan Poe and Albert Einstein have reminded us that “space and duration are one” (Poe 1859, 196). However, we are not so accustomed to reflecting on the policy implications of this axiom for money. Fascinatingly, Schurtz's evidence suggests that sign-money loses value (inflates) as it becomes physically distant from its origin, while use-money gains value (deflates) as it does the same. For example, a cowrie shell string would lose one shell for each amount of distance it traversed from the seacoast, while salt would gain value as it goes further and further away from its place of origin (see 110, 142). In actuality, this is merely evidence of how exchange rates operate more generally, but today's world of nationalized money means that we only experience such place-based inflation at national borders, instead of within them. For policymakers seeking to lower carbon footprints, for example, implementing place-based inflation (just as central banks aim for time-based inflation) within national borders could be quite a powerful tactic. If the primordial purpose of the community and its members was to keep themselves in balance with surrounding nature, and if any labor that went beyond the absolutely necessary was voluntary, now the prospect of an endless, essential enforced activity and toil emerged, which was rooted in and incentivized by the inequality of anticipated rewards and completely shattered the old communism. (67) This observation leads us to another general tendency. To wit, more standard nation-state monetary theory has relied for centuries on a vital tactic known as sterilization. Sterilization “kills” hoarded economic value by not allowing it to become monetized—examples include practices by the Bank of Amsterdam in the 1700s and the Fed in the 2000s. Seen in this light, the finely honed central bank practice of sterilization is but a variation on a far older and more widespread tactic by communities the world over to carefully monitor their currency's value. Given this, the broader message from Schurtz's book seems to be that, despite the irreducible difference among monetary forms across ages and cultures, humans are all one. If Adam Smith humbled the Mercantilists by forever putting to bed their “love of plate,” Schurtz gives us what I have come to call “the Mercantilists' Last Laugh.” Smith and his powerful acolytes in the present take for granted that “transactions” (i.e., inside-money)—and not the piling up of plate (i.e., outside-money)—are what really matter to an economy. But this has never been true. Instead, while states have stopped individuals from focusing on plate, the history of central banking reveals that states themselves supercharged their interest in it. In other words, their theories disavowed the need to pile up outside-money, but their practices revealed that Smith's “truth” stands as a central falsehood driving the history of modern economic thought. The emergence of specific internal monetary systems is always supported by the inclination to transform outside-money into inside-money, and to employ money not to facilitate external trade, as one might assume according to common theories, but rather to obstruct it. … This can be traced back to the desire to create an invisible commercial border around the country and to prevent objects of value from flowing back and forth too quickly. (155–156)
Gustav Peebles (Thu,) studied this question.